This is an easy one. If I were an animal, I’d definitely be a snail. Nothing exotic or interesting; just the plain little slimy brown pest that you find in your garden after it rains.
As someone with AvPD, the animals I most relate to are obviously the ones with hard shells. Turtles and tortoises, hermit crabs, horseshoe crabs. But turtles are too popular, too universally liked, and tortoises are too hardy. Hermit crabs occasionally leave their shell to find a better-suited one, which I wish I could do but can’t. And horseshoe crabs are too interesting, too majestic, being one of the oldest species on earth (plus, I hate the ocean, it’s too scary, so probably wouldn’t be an ocean critter).
Snails are not very well-liked. They cause trouble in people’s gardens when they show up there. They are slimy and unappealing. And they like to hide. You don’t see them unless conditions are precisely to their liking (i.e. probably not if it’s a warm and sunny dry day). Even if you do see them, they’re probably hiding in their shell. And their shell is a part of them; they can’t just come out of it. They live in wooded spaces, which is the sort of terrain I’ve always called home.
Also, the spiral on their shell: spirals have always been a “thing” of mine, for a number of reasons: my natural appearance (I have very curly hair), my lifelong doodling habit (one thing I have always loved to mindlessly draw is repeating patterns of spirals), my spirituality (Celtic Christianity has always been my favorite flavor of Christianity, and the one that resonates with me; the triskelion is a symbol you often see in early Christian design and architecture from that region), and the basic meaning/implication of a spiral, the way it curves ever inwards, going around and around on itself. The perfect symbol of an introverted overthinker.
“I tried, but can’t find refuge in the angle,” sings Sam Phillips in her song “5 Colors,” one of my favorite songs: “I walk the mystery of the curve.” That line always reminded me of myself a lot, trying to make life tolerable with rigid rules and systems but always finding out, in the end, that life is more nuanced and rounded than I wanted it to be.
Also, another reason I feel an affinity for snails: many years ago, for reasons I can no longer remember, my then best friend and I, over lunch in the middle school cafeteria, came up with this bizarre inside joke that I had two invisible twin snails who lived on my head. I wish I could remember the origins of this joke. Our shared drawings and notes and things we passed back and forth were frequently adorned with drawings of snails.
And on my first trip to Germany, when (long story short) I was feeling just very out of place and messed up and disliked by everyone in my life, one of the few bright spots in my memory of those days is taking long walks alone through the neighborhood to a nearby park, with my headphones on, and seeing just so many cool snails hanging out on all the leaves and flowers. In German they’re called Schnecken, and slugs are called “Nacktschnecken” i.e. “naked snails,” which is one of my favorite bits of vocab trivia about German.
So yeah. Snails have long been my “spirit animal” lol. If I were still into tattoos I might get one of a snail next, but, I don’t do those anymore, and regret all of mine, which is another story.
MiTHology (4.0) 